As mentioned in my previous post I’m in Redmond (WA) to join the Enterprise Mobility deep dive airlift. During my three-day stay I’ll listen, learn and getting inspired of all cool stuff Enterprise Mobility has to offer. On the first day we covered the hybrid identity part of EMS which means – Azure AD Connect, Azure AD Premium – which provided a lot of new insights and key takeaways.

Azure AD Connect

During the first day we covered the Azure AD Connect tool including new features we can expect in the next release of Azure AD Connect – Public Preview 2. Imported is to understand which solution(s) customers currently have implemented and which solution is most suitable in near future to stay supported or introduce new scenarios such as multi-forest environments, writeback capabilities such as password, users, groups and devices and even bring custom schema extensions to Azure AD.

Azure AD Connect is an essential component to enable new hybrid identity scenarios. It accomplishes on premise AD objects getting synced to Azure AD and vice versa. The Azure AD Connect is the primer to get objects easilay synced, based on your terms. Azure AD Connect will be your one-shop stop for hybrid identity scenarios.

Public Preview 2

With Public Preview 2 of Azure AD Connect we can expect a lot of new features which enables new hybrid identity scenarios. Currently password writeback is supported but will be extended with User writeback, Group Writeback, Device writeback, Directory extensions attributes and sync of Devices and Computers to Azure AD. This allows you to manage on premise resources from the cloud. Be sure you’ve enabled Azure AD Premium to take advantage of all writeback features.

Another cool feature is Azure AD Connect take care of the entire installation and configuration of both Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) & Web Application Proxy (WAP) server(s) farm set up. Your hybrid identity solution is on your fingertips just in a few clicks!

When Public Preview 2 of Azure AD Connect becomes available is not yet known, but I expect that it will not take long. Currently you can download the Public Preview 1 of Azure AD Connect using the following link. Take into account this version is not supported for production and is ment for lab of test evironments.

In the next couple of days I’ll share some more about Azure AD, Microsoft Intune and Azure RMS. So stay tuned and follow me by Twitter @ronnydejong